Ma and George Horner, a retired⁹ doctor who lives near Philadelphia, embraced warmly in a small room at Boston's Symphony Hall on Tuesday afternoon before a brief rehearsal¹⁰.

 

Ma thanked Horner for helping¹¹ the Terezin Music Foundation, named for the town of Terezin, site of an unusual Jewish ghetto¹²（贫民区） in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Even amid death and hard labor¹³, Nazi⁷ soldiers there allowed prisoners to stage performances.

 

On Tuesday night, they will play music composed 70 years ago when Horner was incarcerated¹⁴（监禁）.

 

"It's an extraordinary link to the past," said concert organizer Mark Ludwig, who leads the foundation.

 

Horner played piano and accordion¹⁵ in the Terezin cabarets, including tunes¹⁶ written by fellow inmate¹⁷ Karel Svenk. On Tuesday, Horner will play two of Svenk's works solo - a march and a lullaby（摇篮曲） - and then team up with Ma for a third piece called "How Come the Black Man Sits in the Back of the Bus?"

 

Svenk did not survive the genocide. But his musical legacy¹⁸ has, due in part to a chance meeting of Ludwig, a scholar of Terezin composers, and Horner, who never forgot the songs that were written and played in captivity¹⁹.

 

Still, Ludwig found it hard to ask Horner to perform pieces laden²⁰ with such difficult memories.

 

"To ask somebody who ... played this in the camps, that's asking a lot," said Ludwig.

 

Yet Horner readily agreed to what he described as a "noble" mission. It didn't hurt that he would be sharing the stage with Ma - even if he thought Ludwig was joking at first.

 

"I told him, 'Do you want me to swallow that one?'" Horner recalled with a laugh. "I couldn't believe it because it's a fantastic thing for me."

 

Ma said before the performance that he hoped it will inspire people to a better future.

 

"I grew up with the words, 'never again,'" said Ma, who was born 10 years after the end of World War II revealed the scope of the Holocaust. "It is kind of inconceivable that there are people who say the Holocaust didn't exist. George Horner is a living contradiction of what those people are saying."

 

He said Horner was able to survive "because he had music, because he had friends, because the power of music could fill in the empty spaces."

 

"To me George Horner is a huge hero, and is a huge inspiration," Ma said. "He is a witness to a window, and to a slice of history, that we never want to see again, and yet we keep seeing versions of that all over the world. I hope we are inspired by that and we keep that memory forever."

 

The program features additional performances by Ma and the Hawthorne String Quartet. In a statement, Ma said he's glad the foundation is "giving voice through music to those whose voices have been tragically²¹ silenced."

 

Horner was 21 when he was freed by Allied²² soldiers in 1945 after serving time at Terezin, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His parents and sister perished in the camps.

 

And though his back still bears the scars of a Nazi beating, he remains²³ spry and seems much younger than his 90 years.

 

When Horner found out about the duet（二重奏） with Ma, Ludwig said, "He was so excited, to me he sounded like a teenager."

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